World Honors Holocaust Victims 71 years After Auschwitz Liberated

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As Europe witnesses the resurgence of anti-Semitism only seven decades after the Holocaust, leaders around the globe stopped to recall its lessons.

Dozens of elderly Holocaust survivors lit candles at Auschwitz on Wednesday, exactly 71 years after the Soviet army liberated the death camp that has become the most powerful symbol of the human suffering inflicted by Nazi Germany during World War II.

The commemoration at the former death camp in southern Poland, an area under Nazi occupation during the war, is part of the UN-designated International Holocaust Remembrance Day, marked by politicians, survivors and others in ceremonies and events across the world.

At Auschwitz some of the survivors wore sashes or scarves that recalled the striped pajama-style clothing that prisoners were forced to wear. They placed candles and wreaths at a wall where many prisoners were executed before gathering with the presidents of Poland and Croatia for official ceremonies.

The Nazis killed more than 1 million people at Auschwitz, most of them Jews but also Roma, non-Jewish Poles and others.

This year’s commemorations come as a resurgence of anti-Semitism casts a shadow over a new generation of European Jews, something that is driving thousands of them each year to leave the continent.

In Germany, where hundreds of thousands of Muslim refugees have arrived in the past year, Jews feel threatened from both the far right and people coming from countries like Syria.

World Jewish Congress (WJC) president Ronald Lauder said in a statement sent to The Associated Press: “Many anti-Semites and Holocaust deniers are not afraid any more to spread their hateful messages. They do it more and more openly, on the Internet, in public places….Sometimes, Jews are even made scapegoats for the influx of refugees into Europe.”

Holocaust Remembered and Marked Worldwide

Amid rising intolerance, some elected leaders are trying to do more to fight hatred.

Holocaust survivor Ruth Klueger. (AP/Michael Sohn)

Britain’s Prime Minister David Cameron announced Wednesday that a planned national memorial to Holocaust victims will be built next to the parliament building in central London “as a permanent statement of our values as a nation.”

There were other official commemorations across Europe on Wednesday — from Estonia and Lithuania to Serbia and Albania. Meanwhile, US President Barack Obama marked the day by honoring four people — two Americans and two Poles — for risking their lives to protect Jews during the Holocaust.

In Berlin, the German Parliament gathered to remember the victims of the Holocaust and heard Ruth Klueger, an Austrian-born writer who survived Auschwitz and other camps, tell of her experience as a camp inmate and slave laborer.

Klueger, now 84, also recalled the initial denial of Nazi crimes in post-war Germany and contrasted that with the country now.

“Two or even three generations have grown up here since then and this country, which was responsible 80 years ago for the worst crimes of the century, has today won the applause of the world thanks to its open borders and the generosity with which it has taken in Syrian and other refugees, and still is,” Klueger said.